“I guess,” Gretchen said. “He’s a fucker.”
“He really is,” Stacy said.
The two girls looked at each other—Stacy with her arms crossed, Gretchen nodding—in a way that was like,
Maybe you’re OK, maybe.
“So were you the ones who did that with the animals?” Stacy Bensen asked.
“The animals?” Gretchen asked.
“The lawn animals, having sex.”
“Yeah. That was us,” Gretchen said.
“How come?”
“I dunno,” she whispered. “To cheer you up, I guess.”
“It didn’t cheer me up. It freaked me out.”
“Sorry about that,” Gretchen said.
“Yeah. It was pretty funny, though.”
“Yeah.”
“Well, thanks for coming by, I guess.”
“Yeah.” On the porch, we all stood for a moment, the faraway sound of laughter from a sitcom on the TV rising.
Was it
Charles in Charge
? Was she watching TV? She’s just as lonely as us
, I thought suddenly.
“Do you guys want to come in or something?” Stacy asked, holding the side of her bandaged nose. There were tiny red flecks of blood along the edge.
“I dunno. Can I bum a smoke?” Gretchen asked.
Stacy nodded, dug into her sweatshirt pocket, and handed Gretchen the pack. Gretchen fumbled nervously for a cigarette, placed it in her mouth, noticed it was a menthol, asked, “Is this menthol?” to which Stacy nodded, but Gretchen lit it anyway.
“Does Brian want one?” Stacy asked.
“No, he doesn’t smoke,” Gretchen said.
“Nope,” I said. “My pipes are clean,” I said, and then definitely decided there would be no more talking for me.
“So,” Gretchen whispered, nodding again.
“So,” Stacy whispered back. “So. So you ever been to a tanning salon?”
“Who me?” Gretchen asked. “Nah.”
“I got a tanning bed in the basement. You guys want to look at it?”
“I dunno. Not really,” Gretchen said with a shrug.
“Well, do you guys want to help me make cookies? I promised my little brother I’d make him some.”
“Yeah, I dunno. But thanks for asking. We gotta be going, Brian’s got to be home.”
“OK,” she said.
“OK.”
“So see you around, though.”
“Yeah, see you around,” Gretchen said, starting down the steps. As soon as we heard the door shut, Gretchen turned and grabbed the first blue bunny from the garden, put it up right behind a garden gnome like it was humping it, and then ran to her car, started it up, and began honking. Stacy Bensen came to the door, holding her nose, and nodded, looking at the poor rabbit and gnome, just standing there. I could not tell whether she was laughing or crying.
After that, we drove over to Marist High School’s football field where Gretchen said Stacy Bensen’s boyfriend would probably be practicing. All the sport-os and jocks had their red practice football uniforms on and were doing drills and throwing passes and smacking each other’s asses after every fucking play. Gretchen and I sat in the Escort listening to it idle hard, and cranked up “Wasted” by Black Flag when it came on.
“So what are we doing here?” I asked, finally.
“We’re gonna fuck that guy up.”
“Are you gonna run him down or something?” I asked.
“No. I dunno. Do you got any ideas?”
“No.”
“We could throw something at him and then drive off.”
“Like what?”
“How about a brick?”
“I don’t know about that. How about some sloppy food, like chili?”
“No, no, I got it,” she said. “How about a bag of shit?”
“Where are you gonna get a bag of shit?”
“I dunno,” she said. “Do you need to take a crap?”
“Nope,” I said, shaking my head.
“How about a bag of piss? Do you have to pee at all?”
“I could pee,” I said. “I could definitely pee. Where do we get a bag?”
We drove over to the Jewel on 103rd, bought the largest size of Ziplock bag we could find, and doubled back, parking in front of the football field in exactly the same spot. I thought if I did all this Gretchen would think I was kind of bad-ass—you know, unconcerned with getting busted and all—and I was fine with it until we were there in the Marist High School parking lot and she said, “OK, go pee.”
“Right here?”
“Yeah, I don’t care.”
“I’m not going to pee in front of you.”
“Why not?” she asked.
“Fuck you, why not,” I said.
“Then do it behind one of these cars.”
“Fine.”
I hopped out of the car, taking one of the big plastic bags with me. I slumped down behind someone’s red convertible and unzipped my pants, took out my dong, and started peeing into the bag. It was hot and it stunk and I scrunched my nose as I smelled it, laughing. Gretchen was in the car, watching it all in the rearview mirror. I finished peeing, filling the bag up halfway, then zipped it up quick. I carried the bag of piss, all hot and steamy inside, back to the car and started sitting down again.
“Dude, you’re not getting in this car with that,” she said, slamming down the lock with her hand. I stood there, holding the bag of piss, shaking my head.
“Dude,” I said. “I don’t even want to be doing this shit. You made me do it, now open the door.”
“Look, look, football practice is ending,” she said, pointing across the field. The entire football team was in a large huddle, all of them with their helmets off, their short hair mussed, their handsome faces glistening with sweat.
“Do you know who the guy is?” I asked.
“I know him,” she said.
“So how are we going to do this?”
“We’ll pull up to him and you open the bag and toss it at him.”
“I have to toss it?” I asked.
“I have to drive,” she said.
“Fine, fuck you, whatever, open the door,” I said.
Gretchen popped up the lock of the car door and I sat down, holding the bag away from my body.
“That smells,” she said.
“Yeah, it does.”
“It’s bright yellow!” she shouted, holding her nose and laughing. “Why is it so yellow?”
“I dunno. I take vitamins in the morning, maybe that’s it.”
“Jesus, put it in the backseat or something.”
I nodded and put the bag down by my feet.
“Now what?” I asked.
“Now, we wait,” she said, and backed the Escort toward the front of the parking lot, where a long, narrow cement path led from the field-house to where the students parked their cars. We waited, listening to the same songs which had been playing over and over again since her last mix-tape got stuck in the tape player, the monotony of it comforting, familiar, something you could always count on. After twenty minutes or so, a brown metal door opened and five or six football types clambered out, laughing, snorting, high-fiving each other, nodding.
“OK, tell me when,” I said.
“He’s blond,” she said, “and he’s got this shit-eating grin.”
“How do you know him?”
“He fucked Kim, when she was a cheerleader,” Gretchen whispered, and at once I knew this had more to do with that than with poor old Stacy Bensen. I looked back to where the football players were marching out—whistling, he-hawing—and then Gretchen leaned over and pointed, grabbing my shoulder hard. “That’s him. That’s fucking him, all right.”
I swallowed hard and grabbed the bag of piss at my feet.
This guy, Mark Dayton, didn’t look like such a bad guy, except that he was tall, blond, and good-looking—the kind of guy girls wet their fucking pants over all the time. His face was wet and shiny, and he had a soft white towel around his shoulders, still drying his hair as he talked over important jock stuff with some other football-type, the two of them nodding seriously, maybe mumbling, “
32-29-36, hike?”
then, “
Fumble, pass, first down?”
I unlocked the car door, grabbed the door handle with my left hand, held the pee bag with my right, and waited, waited, waited until Mark Dayton was like three feet from the Escort. Then I flung open the car door, shouted, “Hey, fucker!” and whipped the bag of pee at Mark Dayton’s chest. It flew end over end at him, smacking him directly on his neck, then fell at his feet, still closed, not even broken—just this hot, clear bag of pee lying there unopened at his feet. I felt the hot stupidity of the situation smack me in the head, suddenly remembering,
I forgot to open it. I forgot to open the fucking thing.
“What the fuck?” the thick-necked dude beside Mark Dayton asked, throwing down his gym bag and charging toward the car, but Gretchen had already hit the gas. I was slow closing the door and it nicked the back end of someone’s Blazer before we pulled away, spinning out of the parking lot like a scene from a car-chase-type movie.
“Sorry,” I said after a while. “I guess I forgot to open the bag.”
“You’re just an idiot,” was all she said back.
OK, I had some beers with Mr. D. Like I said, I went by to see Gretchen and there was like only five days left before Homecoming, and I decided I would finally, finally, finally ask her. Mr. D. answered the door and said, “Hey, Brian, how you doing, champ?” and he had a can of the Beast—Milwaukee’s Best, my dad’s favorite beer—in his hand and I think he might have been drinking for a while because he was still wearing his, “Kiss the Cook” apron and smiling a little too much and winking at me, I guess. I asked, “Is, um, Gretchen home?” shrugging my shoulders, staring down at my feet.
“Brian, all the girls are gone for the night. Jess is at work and Gretch is out with Kim,” which I knew was straight-up bullshit because Kim was working at Orange Julius, which must have meant Gretchen was either out hanging alone at Haunted Trails waiting to choke down Tony Degan’s member, or doing whatever she had decided to with him, pinned underneath his gorilla-type cro-mag hands already.
“Oh, that’s cool,” I said. “I’ll call her later.”
“You can hang out here, if you want to wait ’til she gets back.”
“Yeah, I dunno, Mr. D. I might just head home.”
“Oh, come on, pal, why don’t you come on in and we’ll have a beer. How’s that sound, champ?”
OK, now, nowhere, in the short history of my life, had any adult ever asked me to have a fucking beer with them. It was so random and weird that I didn’t know what else to say but, well, yes.
I nodded and followed him inside and we went to the kitchen and he fished another Beast out of the fridge and handed it to me, just like that, as if it was something we just did, the two of us, always drinking together.
“Wait a minute—you want it in a glass?” he asked.
“No, the can’s cool,” I said, feeling more weird and uncomfortable than ever. I followed him over to the kitchen table and we sat down, him across from me, as he started patting down this thinning hair and smiling strangely at me.
“So it’s just us. Just the men,” he sighed. “Just the men. The bachelors,” he said.
“Yep,” I said.
“Hey, how long have you known Gretchen?” he asked, kind of surprised by his own question.
“Since junior high,” I said.
“Sure, sure, you were on the math team together, weren’t you?”
“Yep.”
“Go math team!” he hooted. “Those were the days, huh?”
“I guess.”
“You guys were unstoppable, huh? All out victory!”
“Yep,” I said.
“Whatever happened to that Chinese kid on the team?”
“Greg? He was Filipino,” I said.
“That kid. He was a great kid. Whatever happened to him?”
“Oh, you know, he’s going to high school,” I said, taking a swig of the beer.
“Yeah, high school,” Mr. D. said. “Hey, you remember that time you guys made it to the semifinals and we all drove down to Springfield?”
“Yep.”
“And Mrs. D. made all you guys T-shirts, the ones that said, ‘Math Team Semifinal Champs,’ but you didn’t win, but you all wore the T-shirts anyway?”
“Yeah, that was kinda funny.”
“Yep,” Mr. D. said, “that was kind of funny. Remember, we stopped at that truck stop and that little girl—who was the little girl?”
“Andrea?”
“Andrea wouldn’t get back in the car because she felt so bad for losing.”
“Yeah,” I said. “She was a weird kid.”
“Well, it was her parents,” Mr. D. said. “They had very high expectations for her, you know? All we ever wanted was for you guys to do your best, right?”
“Right.”
“That poor girl, well, she was, what, in seventh grade?” Mr. D. asked.
“Seventh, yep,” I said.
“And her parents must have laid a lot of pressure on her to make her feel like that.”
“Yep,” I said.
“Well,” he smiled, nodding, “Mrs. D. calmed her down and, even though Andrea was in seventh grade, she got her to sit in her lap, and we went home and all you kids were so nice about it. You never told anyone about that, did you, Brian?”
I had never told anyone about that day. I didn’t know why, only I didn’t. “Nope,” I said. “I never told.”
“I didn’t know that day was going to be one of my best memories,” he said, still smiling and nodding. “You never know. That’s the trick, Brian. You never know which times are going to be important until later.”
“Yeah,” I said, feeling more weird each fucking minute. “I guess.”
“That’s why you shouldn’t worry. You should just be happy when you can.”
“That sounds good, Mr. D.,” I said. “Listen, I think I’m gonna head home. I’ll call Gretchen later.”
“Brian?” Mr. D. whispered, raising his head.
“Yeah?”
“You’re a good kid. In case nobody ever tells you that,” he said, and I almost started fucking crying right then.
The truth, then: I was very in love with Gretchen and wanted to ask her to Homecoming, but I was a pussy and embarrassed about being in love with her because she was fat, and also because, well, I knew she didn’t even like me. Not only that, but she was also bigger than me, physically, and also because deep down in the only honest part of my heart, I knew two things: one, she was still very hung-up on Tony Degan; and two, she could, without any trouble, truly kick my ass in like five seconds flat.
So the truth of the matter was this: Homecoming was like two days away and I thought if I took Gretchen maybe I would regret it. I had had a bad enough high school experience as it was and, well, you know, did not exactly fit in and all, and I was afraid that Gretchen might do something at the dance, you know, like break Amy Schaffer’s arm. I’m not joking—I mean, she had done that kind of shit already, for real.